50 Years of Hip-Hop

On August 11, 1973, DJ Kool Herc and his sister Cindy threw a back-to-school jam at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. This party, held in the rec room of the apartment building, is widely considered the birthplace of hip-hop.

Herc had ingeniously rewired his father's equipment into a sound system that allowed each turntable to have its own channel. Through it, he tried to get the people dancing but was having trouble keeping the momentum going — until he focused on isolating and repeating the most danceable parts (or the "breaks") of the funk and soul records he was playing, a technique that became the foundation for not just the genre of hip-hop as we understand it today, but the craft of DJing in general.

It was this technical innovation that has long marked this occasion as the birth of hip-hop, and cemented Kool Herc as its father. But the culture in all its aspects is built on original ingenuity that stretches back to time immemorial — from the powerful soundsystems of the Jamaican scene that Herc knew from his youth, to the West African oral tradition of the griot.

That the 1973 back-to-school jam at Sedgwick is the first documented hip-hop party is indisputable, representing a standout benchmark when musical influences were melding, and experimentation and systems were king. It represents a point in a continuum of brilliance that extends back to the continent, a mastery of expressive technologies — audio, linguistic, artistic — that has since touched every corner of our world and evolved into one of the most significant cultural forces today. Hip-hop has given marginalized peoples a microphone, changed how music is made, spawned new forms, and become a multi-billion dollar industry.

2023 marks 50 years since Kool Herc's party. We'll be celebrating the anniversary all year long, focusing on a different year in its half-centennial each week. Expect personal reflections, iconic tracks and albums, and conversations around the genesis of the culture, everywhere you find KEXP.